"Let's say farewell with a sigh... not goodbye."
Nancy Wilson's heartfelt rendering of the Gordon Jenkins classic, Goodbye, one of the underclass of songs that should have been standards but never quite made it, was one of the superb highlights of a moving concert Saturday afternoon for the late Dr. Oscar Peterson.
When these things are set up, there is an expectation that a speedily planned and executed tribute will necessarily be a little disappointing.
Not so in this case.
And the reason became clear shortly after proceedings began: each and every participant, from host Valerie Pringle to the singers, players and just the talkers (Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Bob Rae and Governor General Michaël Jean) had a personal relationships with the brilliant late pianist. They spoke and played with the deep conviction stemming from that personal admiration and love for him.
The Governor-General spoke of how, as an immigrant child of not-well-off parents living in the same neighbourhood of Montreal where Peterson grew up, she learned of his shining example of how to conduct oneself.
In a taped message, Stevie Wonder could not contain the sense of joy he got from meeting OP and talking to him for two hours. The pair planned an album where Oscar would play and Stevie would sing standards. "He told me it would be a magical time," said Wonder in his inimitable breathless run-on sentence of a speech. He stood in awe of "someone that everyone knows as the world's greatest pianist," said Wonder. He said he could still, "feel every single chord and emotion he shared with us."
Quincy Jones rambled, but in his own amiable way got around to the key points eventually. He remembered hearing the rumours around Jazz At The Philharmonic that Norman Granz had discovered some whiz kid from Canada who "drank nitroglycerin and chewed gunpowder. We found out that the stories were true," he laughed.
"He raised the bar and set the standards," the multi-Grammy, multi-Oscar winning bandleader said. "The rest of us are lucky if we catch up with 10 per cent of what Oscar was as a human being, and a musician."
His daughter Celine implied the enormity of their personal loss with remembrances of family life: Oscar feeding the three dogs peanut butter and teasing Celine as fathers will good-naturedly do. She and her mother before her, at the IAJE Jazz masters concert the night before spoke of his love of shiny new cameras and his thrill in receiving every new award.
Then, there were the special dinners shared in their Mississauga home with Bob and Arlene Rae, Roy and Ria McMurtry, Bill and Kathleen Davis, all of whom shared a passion for human rights with OP.
Celine explained that, with that special intuition that animals often exhibit, it was the family's youngest dog Smedley — who bore the nickname that Oscar always used for Granz, his mentor and friend of 52 years — who told finally the family that Oscar would play no more. The dog jumped up on his bed the day he died and remained there all day.
The music was as eloquent as the speakers. On Friday night, Oscar's old buddies Oliver Jones and David Young took a nice turn on Hymn To Freedom. It began slow and dirge-like, with a nice gospel feel and then turned into the inimitable swing in mid-stream that is Peterson's defining style.
The same ode to civil rights was used as the closing of the CBC concert Sunday too, this time with soprano Measha Brueggergosman raising the rafters. Her vocal instrument (it's more than a voice) is astounding and almost other-worldly.
After it first appeared on his 1962 album Night Train, Harriette Hamilton wrote stirring lyrics to Peterson's majestic melody of Hymn to Freedom. "When every heart meets every heart and together yearns for liberty, that's when we'll be free," it begins.
As was evident from the long lines outside Roy Thomson Hall and the tears and love that flowed inside it, whenever Oscar Peterson was involved, a lot of hearts met other hearts and shared their love of liberty, music and humanity.